Saving for High Definition

bjrohner wrote on 5/15/2006, 7:26 AM
I've had my old home movies captured to a hard drive using uncompressed Black Magic codec. (lower field first) which they told me would be excellent for making high definition movies when the time was right.

What I want to do is edit these files to place them in order, remove the garbage,ect.
and archive them to include in a high definition movie for playback on my plasma TV when the disc burning and playback equipment become available.

I've tried test clips using:
default (uncompressed) which doesn't look very good on the computer
NTSC DV(uncompressed) which is lower field first and looks good.
1080i intermediate which says it is upper field first and the video was distorted and had lines in it on my computer.
720p intermediate which looked the best.

Since I'm viewing these test clips on my computer, I don't know how to actually select the best one to use for saving my files. (does progressive always look better on a computer, is the 1080i distorted only on the computer because of the aspect ratio).

I would appreciate any recomendation from you wizz kids as to the best way to save after editing. I have tons of hard drive and don't really care about the file size or time it takes to render.

Thank You
Bob

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 5/15/2006, 7:08 PM
Computers display interlaced badly, because computers are progressive scan only. Played out to an HD display, they'll display correctly without the interlace artifacts messing you up.
1080i is just the opposite of what you've stored. I'd recommend either sticking with the UFF for HD, or converting to progressive, which will cost you a small amount of resolution.
The 1080 should NOT be distorted due to aspect ratio. You should be viewing uncompressed HD files as 1920 x 1080i with an aspect of 1.0. Anything otherwise will result in distortion.